Updates

IOST Update November 5th 2018

IOST UPDATE NOVEMBER 5TH 2018

Hello IOST Community! Wishing you all a Happy Halloween from the IOST team as we enter November. It’s an exciting time as the past two weeks have been filled with action, and we’re proud to share our spookily packed bi-weekly rundown including CEO Jimmy Zhong’s live Telegram AMA, IOST at the Malta Blockchain Summit, Bitcoin turning 10, the first IOST puzzle, a tech update, and much more! Read on for a full rundown on everything IOST!

CEO JIMMY ZHONG’S LIVE TELEGRAM AMA

CEO Jimmy Zhong had the opportunity to speak directly with the IOST community on Telegram last week. In the conversation, he touched on a variety of subjects including ecosystem development, a deeper explanation of how PoB works, how our research and development team has evolved their plans to implement sharding, and much more! You can find the summary of his live interview here.

MALTA BLOCKCHAIN SUMMIT

IOST was well represented at the Malta Blockchain Summit, hosting a booth and participating in several of the events. European Business Development Lead Kacper Zytkowicz fielded significant interest about IOST and the team had the chance to meet with some of the leaders at the forefront of the Malta blockchain movement. In recent months, Malta has passed strongly favorable blockchain legislation in order to turn itself into a hub for the burgeoning blockchain industry.

EVERSYSTEM GAMING

Last week IOST sponsored a hands-on DApp event in Nagoya with our local partner EverSystem. EverSystem recently released the extremely popular DApp game “CryptoNinja” and we are currently discussing a collaboration so that their next DApp game is built on top of IOST!

BITCOIN’S 10TH BIRTHDAY!

Halloween marked a special day for the entire blockchain industry as Bitcoin turned 10! CEO Jimmy Zhong had the chance to weigh in on the significance of Bitcoin and how far we’ve come in the past 10 years. Below is an excerpt from one of his interviews:

“Ten years ago, the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto posted an eight-page whitepaper with one clear, disruptive idea: that there can be a world in which people — not financial institutions — hold the power. Since it was first launched, Bitcoin has inspired a ripple effect that has grown exponentially, from a mailing list of cryptography experts to an international market disrupting some of the most entrenched institutions that have ever existed. Over the past ten years, an idea that originally targeted financial institutions has blossomed into a global movement to hold centralized authorities accountable, including technological institutions like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple. It has never been a better time for Bitcoin and other blockchains. Price has and always will fluctuate, but what truly matters is that the core of engineers, believers, and dreamers have continued to grow, improving the technology and inspiring new projects to push the boundaries of what can be accomplished! In the next ten years, the world will change dramatically — and we believe blockchain will make that change more equitable for every person.”

PRESENTATION TO THE TOYAMA BLOCKCHAIN RESEARCH GROUP

IOST Japan Business Development Lead, Makoto Ota, presented at the 7th “Toyama Blockchain Research Group Meetup,” hosted by INTEC, one of the largest SIER’s in Japan. 30 local engineers joined the event which was featured on Japanese television!

JIMMY INTERVIEWED BY BTC MANAGER

CEO Jimmy Zhong was interviewed by BTC Manager last week and gave advice for computer science students and engineers considering a career in blockchain. Jimmy also covered how IOST is planning on dealing with network effect, clarified some of the differences between IOST and EOS, and spoke about his favorite tech project that isn’t IOST. You can read the full interview here.

CRYPTOGRAPHIC PUZZLE

Last week IOST, released a cryptographic puzzle with the help of @Cehhiro, who conceptualized and designed the piece. The puzzle was contained in the featured image and the person who figured out the clues would be able to find a private key that opened a wallet with a prize of IOST. We were extremely impressed as the problem was solved in a lightning fast 9 hours – congratulations to @mapl3sn0w for figuring out the puzzle! CTO Terry posted an explanation of the solution here.

This will not be the last brain teaser we create for our community, follow us on twitterand join our telegram to make sure you don’t miss the next one!

CCN PODCAST

IOST Head of Digital, Ben Waters and Communications Lead, Josh Bass, were interviewed on the CCN Podcast about PoB, the IOST team, how IOST solves the centralization problems of competitors like EOS, and more. You can listen to the full podcast here!

IOST IN THE PRESS

IOST was featured in many publications and news sites over the last 2 weeks. Here is a summary of some of the best!

Tech Update

Conducted top-level economic model review, as well as in-depth evaluations.

Updated voting system design based on the economic model.

Design

Finished Base contract development, pending test. This is the first transaction for each block and it includes all system contracts.

Finished development and testing on Gas contracts.

Finished development on RAM contract, pending test.

Finished general voting contracts. Rebuilt voting contract.

Optimized JavaScript contracts and added support for json parameters.

Consensus contracts: Updated “iost.issue” and “iost.bonus” to be compatible with Account, Permissions and Fix-point numbers.

Rebuild node discovery to insure new node can connect into the network.

Implement HTTP plug-in for administrators, allowing them to dynamically control node connectivity and manage blacklist

Debug

Tested internode latency, and solve an issue with slow sending.

Testing and Operations

Constructed the infrastructure with AWS EKS server.

Virtual Machine

Development

Added RAM usage measurement for VM.

Added amountLimit to limit token consumption in a contract.

Abstracted contract permission validation.

Added functionality to check gas limit when running in native VM

Permission system finished and added to iserve.

Development on “domain” and released.

Coding and testing on OpLog data read/write layer.

Development and testing on Token contracts and Token freeze list.

Optimization

Organized VM interfaces to be compatible with gas and token.

Debug

Fixed the segment error of V8VM requireAuth module.

Fixed the issue where transactions do not update “state” after execution.

The last two weeks were certainly a busy period for IOST with new developments and activity around the world. There are also many exciting events on the horizon for IOST including the launch of Everest v2.0, the upcoming release of the CryptoHeroes beta, and the upcoming announcement of our new industry outreach initiative! You can stay up to date on all things IOST by following us on social media and joining the conversation!